Chapter 7
Death will not be swooned by beauty, by riches, by prayer, nor by pure will alone. It will take its due when the time comes.
Do not hasten Death when it is not yet there; do not fight it when it arrives. Only what we do in the interim between the awareness of Death and its arrival matters.
But what have I done?
Excerpt from “The Way of the Vessel”
by Vessel Iris
They climbed the stairs in silence.
To be exact, Iris climbed the stairs in silence, using his remaining willpower to point his eyes forward and keep his mind away from violent urges.
Meanwhile, Yan made more noise than was necessary, with both his boots and his cursing about carrying too much, despite carrying very little.
His voice echoed through the tall stairwell, amplified with each additional step.
Iris ran his mala through his fingers in a futile attempt to ground himself.
“Creepy,” Yan said when Iris finally led him to the decrepit corridor of the third deck. “Looks like somewhere I’d get murdered, and no one would hear me scream.”
Iris ignored him and hopped over a puddle, half hoping Yan would step right into it and electrocute himself. It was unlikely to happen, and it wouldn’t be technically murder, but Yan wouldn’t appreciate the difference.
“Don’t your feet get cold like that?”
The engineer had successfully made it over the puddle, after all.
Iris wiggled his toes a little, then curled them inwards.
Yes, they were almost always cold, but he paid them no mind.
The cold was just another annoyance, another addition to the myriad unpleasant sensations he had conditioned himself to ignore.
Ruminating on his cold feet wouldn’t warm them.
Ruminating on anything at all never produced the desired effect.
Better to let go. “Not at all,” Iris said instead and kept on walking steadily down the corridor.
When he pulled open the doors to the orchard, the humid air struck them both in the face like a damp pillow.
Yan hurriedly pushed past the doors, grumbling something about the humidity being bad for electronics.
Iris smiled at the sweet smell of rotting apples and followed him inside.
Let me know if anything pings you, he told VIFAI, and it agreed, busy with its background ministrations.
Cut off from the universal feed, it was shooting off requests to anything remotely operational aboard, attempting to triangulate some sort of connection, so far unsuccessfully.
“So, this is where you got all the apples.” Yan picked a glistening red fruit from the closest tree.
He rubbed the apple against his trousers, and once he had deemed it clean enough, took a bite.
“Not bad,” he mumbled with a full mouth.
Still chewing, Yan circled the orchard, scanning the walls.
Iris kept a close eye on the engineer, but otherwise let him have his freedom. Here was safe.
When Yan finally found what he was searching for, it was a panel, similar to the one beside the maintenance room door.
He unceremoniously pried it open with nothing more than his fingernails and brute force—as expected.
This outward display of unrefined strength that Iris would normally find displeasing had landed as impressive, in a primitive sort of way, the way one might be impressed with how easily a boar can toss a tree-trunk.
But as the panel cover slammed against the wall, Iris was at once yanked under a strengthened phantom pulse, wrestling his own heart’s rhythm.
It resonated through him like the beating of a monstrous drum.
It’s pinging me again, VIFAI said, but Iris could only wince in response.
For a moment, his balance left him, and he blindly groped for a tree trunk to steady himself.
But there, in the tree trunk, the beating was even stronger, pushing against his fingertips through the bark with the force of an oceanic tide.
“Is this where your AI got pinged?” Yan asked, the engineer’s voice sounding muffled, like he was speaking underwater.
Iris forced his eyes open; he didn’t know when he had shut them in the first place.
The orchard around him swam. The trees and Yan himself became nothing more than blurry, shifting outlines.
“Yes.” He forced the word out, gripping the tree trunk as hard as he could despite the persistent beating.
“I think we’re being watched.” Yan must have done something to the panel because the pulse had turned jagged, and the spot where VIFAI’s implant was embedded ignited with white-hot pain.
A familiar pain to what Iris had experienced when the implant was first inserted into his brain stem.
He had, until this moment, been successful in blocking out the worst of those memories.
It’s trying to say something.
Tell it to stop, Iris begged and clutched the nape of his neck. Tell it to stop before it melts my brain.
“Oh”—Yan’s fish-tank voice came from above—“don’t tell me the apples weren’t good after all. Riyu will be so pissed.”
“It’s trying to speak,” Iris managed to say; that, and nothing more.
Tell it to stop trying to speak, I beg you.
Iris formed the single coherent thought and was again captured by a wave of unprecedented agony.
And then, in an instant, like waking from a nightmare, the pain vanished.
Cautiously, Iris opened his right eye and then his left.
The searing white curtain that had blinded him only moments ago had been lifted.
His cheeks were covered in a mixture of tears and dirt from where his face was pressed into the ground.
He wiped his face with his sleeve and sat back on his heels, dumbstruck. The pain was instantly forgotten.
It agreed, VIFAI said, and Iris breathed a sigh of relief. He would be spared, for now.
“Do I want to know?” Yan was crouching by the spot where Iris had crumbled.
He didn’t look nor sound conventionally worried, but his voice was low and free of sarcasm, and Iris was grateful for that grain of compassion alone.
“Or is this more of a personal issue?” Yan was also gracious enough to maintain a respectful distance between them.
He was still chewing on his apple between words.
“My AI got pinged again,” Iris said, finally catching his breath.
“The first time it got pinged, everything was procedural, but this time it felt like something was forcing its way into my brain. We’ve established communication with other constructs before, but this is highly peculiar.
There’s also the pulse. I feel it more the closer we get to the centre of the ship. I think it is the ship.”
Saying nothing in return, Yan rocked back on his heels and went to the control panel.
He plugged in his little keyboard and computer and typed out a sequence of keystrokes.
“Do you know why we teach AI constructs human speech?” Yan asked, his eyes flickering between the keyboard and the little screen he had placed at his feet.
“So that they could communicate?”
Yan let out a sharp ha! “Typical answer, but, no, oh, Divine One.”
Iris frowned. There was no need for name-calling.
“Constructs have no trouble communicating at all without spoken language. In fact, they do it much faster and more precisely when we don’t ask them to speak. We have them speak so that we can understand them because we are far too thick to learn their language.”
Iris passed a trembling hand across the smooth dome of his head, and it came back slick with sweat.
Here they were, again, in some manner of truce where the engineer shared his expertise and humoured Iris’s suspicions before Yan grew eventually bored or irritated and they’d be at odds again.
“Are you suggesting, engineer Yan, that whatever it is, it was trying to speak to me in its own language?”
Yan shrugged and typed out another sequence.
His half-eaten apple lay forgotten by his feet.
“Perhaps. There are too many conditions it would need to meet to do that. First, it would need to be an actual construct, which I highly doubt. This ship is over a thousand years old, and proper ship-based AI systems are only a couple hundred. It’s very unlikely the Nicaea would have had an AI system at departure and, frankly, downright impossible that it managed to develop one mid-flight.
Second, whatever it is would need to have a way of communicating that didn’t align with your AI’s presets.
Which, again, would mean it would have to be an actual thousand-year-old AI, and that, as previously stated, is downright, batshit insane.
What’s more likely”—Yan cracked his neck to the left and rolled his head around—“is that someone is aboard this ship and that someone has picked up on your AI’s signal that they’re now trying to hijack.
It wouldn’t feel too good on your end, and it definitely wins the probability award. ”
“Why would they do that?”
“So many good questions, Vessel. I’d say they’re trying to disable you since you’re the only voice here proclaiming how it’s wrong to take the ship apart.
Yes, Ishtan told me. No secrets among colleagues.
” Yan raised his hand to stop Iris from refuting him.
“I’d even say if your own temple wanted the ship, it wouldn’t want you advocating the opposite. ”
“Starlit holds nothing but respect for those who came aboard the generation ships. To leave home in such a way”—Iris was deliberately ignoring the implications of what Yan had said—“to leave everything you know behind and plummet into the darkness with no destination. I’m not certain how they were ever brave enough to do it, but they deserve nothing but our respect. How can anyone be that brave?”